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Jed McCaleb Explains Why He Came Up With Stellar

The concept of cryptocurrencies has been around for years, long before the first one, bitcoin, was released in 2009. They are built upon blockchain technology which provides cryptocurrencies a decentralized ledger to track who owns what. They have been called a democratic phenomenon which will eventually disrupt a number of industries. One of the pioneers of this field is entrepreneur Jed McCaleb which saw their potential years ago.

Some of the main purposes that cryptocurrencies were meant to solve were to reduce the costs of moving money around and enabling people around the globe to financially connect with one another. However, this original concept has been buried by a deluge of new initial coin offerings and projects using crypto. Jed McCaleb came up with a new finance platform named Stellar which is designed to fulfill the original concept of digital currencies. Poor and rich alike can use Stellar all around the world. He set his organization up as a nonprofit, unlike pretty much any other entity behind other cryptocurrencies. His goal is to help people fulfill their basic financial needs.

Stellar Development Fund was established in June 2014. The goal is a philanthropic one, as Jed McCaleb explains it, which is to provide banking services to the half of the world who don’t have access to banking services. As a nonprofit there are no individual profits involved for either the employees of this organization or its investors. Stellar uses open-source code which allows people to send and receive cross-border payments over a service with is distributed in nature.

Jed McCaleb says that so far 100 billion Lumens have been created for the Stellar projects. Lumens are the name of the coin this system uses. His nonprofit adds another 1% of Lumens each year. In order to help get this project off the ground Stripe supplied $3 million and in exchange they received 2% of the Lumens that were available at the time. He says that 18 billion Lumens have been sent out to various entities to date, such as 4 billion to people new to Stellar and another 2 billion held by those who hold bitcoin.